Learning and Teaching Styles in Engineering Education

Air Liquide Engineering in China

Welcome to the pages of AIR LIQUIDE Engineering in China, which consists of two entities: Air Liquide (Hangzhou) Co., Ltd (ALHZ in short) and Air Liquide Engineering Services Asia (Shanghai) Co., Ltd (ALENSA).

Conclusion

Learning styles of most engineering
students and teaching styles of most
engineering professors are incompatible
in several dimensions.

Many or most engineering students are
visual, sensing, inductive, and active,
and some of the most creative students
are global; most engineering education
is auditory, abstract (intuitive),
deductive, passive, and sequential.
These mismatches lead to poor student
performance, professorial frustration,
and a loss to society of many
potentially excellent engineers.
Although the diverse styles with
which students learn are numerous, the
inclusion of a relatively small number
of techniques in an instructor's
repertoire should be sufficient to meet
the needs of most or all of the students
in any class. The techniques and
suggestions given on this page should
serve this purpose.

Professors confronted with this list
might feel that it is impossible to do all
that in a course and still cover the
syllabus. Their concern is not entirely
unfounded: some of the recommended
approaches-particularly those that
involve the inductive organization of
information and opportunities for
student activity during class-may
indeed add to the time it takes to
present a given body of material.
The idea, however, is not to use all
the techniques in every class but rather
to pick several that look feasible and
try them; keep the ones that work; drop
the others; and try a few more in the
next course. In this way a teaching
style that is both effective for students
and comfortable for the professor will
evolve naturally and relatively
painlessly, with a potentially dramatic
effect on the quality of learning that
subsequently occurs.

A class in which students are
always passive is a class in which
neither the active experimenter
nor the reflective observer can
learn effectively. Unfortunately,
most engineering classes fall into
this category.

28.Piaget, J., Science of Education
and the Psychology of the Child, Orion
Press, New York, 1970.

29. Felder, R.M. and L.K.
Silverman, "Learning Styles and
Teaching Styles in Engineering
Education," Presented at the 1987
Annual Meeting of the American
Institute of Chemical Engineers, New
York, Nov. 1987.